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You know Marcella, and Lidia, and Mario. You love them all, and rightly so. But Italy is a big place, with a long and varied food history—as our Associate Editor Ali Slagle said, "There are so! many! people who have shaped Italian cuisines." She reached out to the Hotline, asking you to share the names of the Italian forefathers and mothers who have influenced Italian cooking and the recipes that you find synonymous with them.

It must be noted that at the time, Italy had only been unified for thirty years and many people strongly associated themselves with their region rather than the country. There was no concept of "Italian cuisine", it was regional...Unusual at the time, it was intended for housewives. This is the most famous of pre-WWI Italian cookbooks.

Cv also put in a plug for The Silver Spoon Cookbook, originally published in 1950 by a design and architecture magazine called Domus. The massive work contains more than 2,000 recipes and has gone through eight editions.

Check out what one of his dinner guests wrote of macaroni and cheese—evidently, he didn't warm to the dish quite as much as Jefferson did:

Dined at the President's...Dinner not as elegant as when we dined before. [Among other dishes] a pie called macaroni, which appeared to be a rich crust filled with the strillions of onions, or shallots, which I took it to be, tasted very strong, and not agreeable. Mr. Lewis told me there were none in it; it was an Italian dish, and what appeared like onions was made of flour and butter, with a particularly strong liquor mixed with them.

Eddy Servin Machlin introduced me to the cuisine of the Italian Jews. Here's a link to an article in which she describes (via Marian Burros) "distinctive Jewish Italian foods:www.storylines.com/1982...

Maureen Fant is also the co-author along with my good friend Howard Isaacs of The Dictionary of Italian Cuisine. Published by Ecco in 1998, it is now out of print. I know the authors were able to buy back the rights but I don't know if they've done anything with them yet. I'll see what I can find out.

The glaring omission here is Ada Boni and her classic cookbook "Il talismano della felicità." This is the "Joy of Cooking" for Italians since its publication in 1929 and the most influential book on Italian cuisine written in the 20th century.

Pretty much every single post-WWII document on Italian cuisine with a bibliography will cite "Il talismano."